


All the World in One Breath

by KendylGirl



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name (2017) RPF
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, The Only Quarantine That Could Make Any of This Easier to Take, True Love, super fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:39:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23514034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KendylGirl/pseuds/KendylGirl
Summary: "Of courseI'm coming to you!"
Relationships: Timothée Chalamet/Armie Hammer
Comments: 41
Kudos: 193





	All the World in One Breath

**Author's Note:**

> I figured we needed some sunshine, so I hope this brings you some during these dark days! 😘
> 
>   
> Bless you, Willowbrooke, for your patient navigation down a seemingly endless stream!

“Yeah…yeah, we are. He just got groceries yesterday. We're stocked for a while.” I put my hand over my eyes and sink my elbow down to the glass table top. “Ma, we’re fine, really… _yes_ , him, too…”

A hand on my shoulder, warm and soft. A squeeze, the drag of long fingers across the knob of bone.

“Yes, I’ll tell him.” I look up, find him watching me from the other side of the lanai, eyebrow raised. He shifts the stack of empty dinner dishes in his arms to wiggle his fingers, winks. “He says hi, Ma.” And he disappears through the absent wall into the living room, open to the salt of the night air, to the invisible waves that swish rhythmically in quiet breaths beyond the artful turns of Bermuda grass and precise landscaping, the planned tropical jungle that shields us on all sides, makes me feel we’re alone on a planet built solely for us.

I scrub my hand through my hair, pull it down flat against my face, into my eyes, and hold my breath. “A few weeks. At least. Probably a couple of months. I know the worst of the curve hasn’t hit yet. We’ve got to take it slow so the kids are sure to be safe, too…Right…Yeah, exactly…Look, tell Dad I love him, too…okay…no, it’s all right, I don’t need to talk to him again…” I grip the phone tighter and fold until my forehead hits the beveled table edge. I bang it once lightly and count the seconds as I exhale slowly.

I know he emerges a moment later. My ears track the soft padding of his feet on the flagstone, feel his palm grip my upper arm, his nose probe the back of my head, followed by the muted static of his deep inhale.

A warm fabric pools around my wrist, and I clutch at it before I sit back to see what it is.

My mouth goes dry and falls open. 

It’s the blue swim trunks he’s worn all day, the ones he’d sweat in when he had jogged on the beach before dawn, the ones he’d napped in on the chaise until the sun was too high, the ones he’d grilled dinner in while I’d stood behind him and traced their stitching, forward and back, ducking when he’d snapped the tongs at me and told me to be patient.

The chair shrieks when I jolt backwards and launch off the cushion, whipping around to meet his backward glance, eyes hovering playfully over his shoulder. Then he turns away, keeping his lazy amble down the brick path to the sand, long torso glowing golden in the lantern light at the patio’s edge, cut by a soft white across skin that never sees the sun, kept fresh and ready for my teeth to mark and my tongue to burn.

And he wants to be casual, but I see the coyness there, the same shyness he always gets, and he knows he doesn’t have to feel that way, not when I’m already lost, not when we’d chosen each other years ago. Not when I’d stay on the phone with him for hours just to hear him breathe. Not when his lips closing around a single fingertip can make my insides turn to lava. Not when the world is crumbling at the edges with fear and disease, and the only plane I even considered boarding is the one that brought me directly to him.

“I…I gotta go, Ma. Stay safe. G’night.”

The phone falls out of my hand and clatters to the table as I rip off my t-shirt and drop it behind me. I use a thumb to jerk down my shorts while I jog to catch up, dancing out of them on my tip-toes and a high-pitched yelp as they drop to my ankles and bind me like rope.

When I reach him, he’s already in the shallows, foam coursing around his ankles. I start to run, but the deep sand saps my momentum, slows my motion, makes me push harder to reach him. He stretches himself, arching his back and pressing the heels of his hands toward the sky, and he’s poised like this when I leap at him, climb on his back, and link my forearms around his neck.

He stumbles slightly and laughs, hands coming up to my elbows as he bends slightly at the waist to let me inch higher, leveraging my weight around his shoulders. “Hey, you. What’s the rush?”

“Missed you.”

A breathless chuckle. “Liar.”

“It’s true.” I mouth at his ear, bite softly at his neck. “Where have you been?”

“Waiting for you.” I drop down and splash in the water, sink my toes into the cold sand, and he turns to face me, touching the pads of his fingers to mine, holding my hands without trapping them inside his, giving me the power once more. “Folks doing fine, then?”

I nod and step closer, keep his eyes with mine in the dim light, the half-moon crisp over his shoulder.

“Grandma, too?” His hair is longer now, and it flips up in the breeze.

I shift forward until my thighs brush his. “Everyone’s feeling good…” I nudge my hips just enough, and his abs clench as he shivers. “Really, _really_ good…”

“Hey, Tim, have you ever heard of the Pacific striped octopus?”

I bite my lip. “What? Ah, nooo, but why am I not surprised that _you_ have?”

Our arms sway together, still held by the melded points of our fingers. “I’ve read about it. It is an _amazing_ creature. Do you know how it hunts? You won’t believe it…”

And I don’t answer because I love him like this, love when he teases, when he gives me these glimpses into the vast encyclopedia swirling in his head, because he knows something about everything but still tries to make _me_ feel like the smartest guy in the room.

“It lures in its prey with a tickle.”

I giggle. “Wait, what?”

“It’s true! How it works is, it extends a single tentacle to tap what it craves with a light touch,” and his fingers curl into my palm, “in exactly the right spot,” and he raises my arm and presses his lips to the inside of my wrist, “to get its hapless prey to run straight into its mouth.”

I surge up and kiss him, fall greedily against him so I can swipe my tongue deep while he holds me up, and his shoulders round down to let me take more, and I feel a hot pressure at my hip that makes my own blood sing.

When I ease back and gaze at his face, its flutter of lashes and soft bliss, he whispers, “See that? It _does_ work.”

I close my eyes and turn my head, lay it against his chest, and his arms enfold me. I listen to his pleased hum, like the purr of a jungle cat whose fur tickles the bridge of my nose, feel the pull of the retreating water at my calves, but his back is to the dark abyss and he blocks me from the push of the answering waves.

He’d told me before that I didn’t need to come here. His voice had creaked when he’d spoken, and I knew that he was wrecked about it, but he’d had to come, had to be close to his kids when there was so much happening around them that was wrong and confusing, when they might be afraid and need him, need that stability. He had to pick them before himself.

And I knew what he meant. I knew he’d never say _before you_.

“I get it,” I’d told him. “Don’t worry.”

“I can’t ask you to come down, Timmy. I know that. It wouldn’t be…”

“Wouldn’t be what?”

“Fair, or…right? _Fuck_ , I...you have responsibilities, too…your parents and…and I…I can’t just expect you to—“

“You're not. I never just _expect_ , Armie. But you can. You _should_.”

“ _Timmy_ …” And he’d trailed off, breathing heavy, voice held tight by the twisted vines around his heart.

I had ground my teeth. “I’m coming,” and I’d hissed it at him like it was a threat. Because it was not even a question to me. It was not a choice. He would be here, and that’s all that mattered. If he were in a weather station above the Arctic Circle or in a bunker in South Dakota, if I’d had to take three planes and two charters and a bus to reach him, it wouldn’t fucking matter. “I love you more than…than…” And I’d punched the wall of my hotel room, ignored the smudge of red that had appeared on the paint. “Jesus, I don’t even have the fucking _words_ , Armie. _Of_ _course_ I’m coming to you!”

His head arcs around now, voice full of wonder. “I love it out here at night.”

I breathe slowly, finally stand up taller so I can peek over his shoulder at the sliver of moonlight shimmering on the water. “Is it dangerous?”

“What’s that?”

I gesture with my chin. “Whatever is, I don’t know, _out there_.”

He kisses my eyebrow. “No. I’ll protect you,” and he walks backward, pulling me with him, his arms my insulation from the buffet of chilled water, and I watch his eyes smile down at me, feel it like fingers stroking my cheeks. “There’s safety in numbers.”

“But there’s only two of us.”

“That’s all we need.”

The sand leaves us, hands us over to the water and lets us float blind, and all I can picture is Jaws and killer jellyfish and giant squid and whatever monsters lurk in the cryptic fathoms, too horrible to name.

He swims with ease, dips and circles around me like he was born here in the ocean where all life began, like he’s finally going to sprout gills and bid the land farewell. Because he _is_ an ocean. He fits with all of its mystery and its depth, all of its life that can only be appreciated when you submerge yourself in it and see clearly through that endless blue.

_Inhale._

I dive, feel my hair float weightless around my face, bubbles of current that gurgle past my arms, a line of cold at my ankle. My ears close up, abandon my brain to its own noise. 

Ebullient, kilowatt energy in a hello as my hands fall off piano keys to steady me on the bench.

The wheezing strain in his voice when he’d tried so hard not to razz me after I’d confessed my paralyzing fear of Barney. 

The teasing groan of my sister when she saw me kiss him for the very first time.

Mellow voice murmuring lyrics behind a lazy guitar.

Slow breaths over the phone, across time zones, a bridge to home.

_Thankgodthankgodthankgod_ gushed into my ear when I’d arrived here this afternoon, and he’d kicked my suitcase aside to hoist me over the threshold and smother me in his bear hug, which forcibly emptied my lungs into the bend of his neck, the first breath I’d had in days.

_Exhale_.

I breech, flip the streaming tendrils away from my face.

A lick of a cloud tasting the moon.

Salt streams into the corners of my mouth.

Sloshes of eddies formed by the fan of his backstroke.

An echoing whoop, a release of tension as cool relief settles around him.

My own laughter pushed out from my chest in waves, blending into the white caps rolling through my spread fingers.

When something brushes my leg, I freeze. “Armie?” I choke out.

He is there in a moment. “Don’t worry. I’ve got you.”

I throw my arms around his neck, glide on the powerful kick of his legs that sends us both back toward the shore. I’m a child of the city. I’m used to concrete and car horns, subway grates and shortcuts. Without that, I’m lost, but he’s in his element. The water drapes around his shoulders like a satin cape, his body streamlined to move in the medium it was built for from the start, and when he sees the panic crusting the ridges of my face, both of his giant hands grip my waist to hold me higher to the sky like I’m being lifted by Adonis and anointed by Artemis as they at last cement their peace.

I’d swear that my blood only flows where he touches me. Was there ever a time when I didn’t need him? Was there ever a point in my life when I didn’t feel him there, and even when he didn’t have a face yet, I _knew_ that he would appear one day? When I’d lie in my room with one hand stuffed in my pants and both eyes on the sun through the window, feeling him out there, feeling him inside me, feeling it was _him_ touching me, hesitantly and desperately, hoping I wanted it as bad as he did?

All those years when I wrote lines in a journal I’d never share, the constant pain I’d chisel into a firm self-loathing, playing the extrovert, my crafted misdirection, walls and mirrors no one could penetrate because I would only reveal myself under the protection of a spotlight on a stage— he was there, his own pain scrawled in the margins for me to translate, like his hand had gripped the pen through it all.

“I’ve loved you my whole life.”

His eyes are so round, so earnest. “You’ve only known me for four years.”

I grab at him, at any part of him within reach. “I’ve known your _name_ for four years. The rest I’ve known forever.”

And he swarms in my space, inches from me, breathless and powerful, head bent in deference to his own heart, his words a heated flow unspooling between us. “Timmy…fuck, I don’t get it, I’ll _never_ get it, I’ll never understand how it’s possible that I…that I didn’t just make you up, that I’m not dreaming right now, that I just—”

I kiss his lips, swipe my tongue across his teeth before I gnaw at his cheekbone, smear a path over his wet skin with slackened lips. The protruding tendons of his neck are slick and tangy with salt water, but the musk of him is only intensified by it, and all of my senses soak him in. 

His hand expands across my lower back, holding me close while I tip down to lap at his nipple, to mouth at his collar bone, taste the dust of heaven that has settled there, the salty droplets of his passage to the speckled starlight above his head.

I want him, have wanted him so badly, and the ache of it burns, so I rub shamelessly against his chilled skin. “You taste like my best dream,” I breathe into his cheek, and he doesn’t laugh at me. He growls, so deep it's a mere vibration, and I feel his grip slide under my hips, the tips of his endless fingers stroking, stroking, gentle feathers of touch.

“Armie…I…please, just…one breath, just one breath…”

And I have no idea what nonsense dribbles from my lips because his heart thuds against my chest, and his hands knead my flesh, part it to seek out the secret parts of me. 

“Tim…” and my need gushes out in his voice, from his throat, the unhindered osmosis of the water between us that passes through his cells to every part of me as we’re held in suspension by the sea. “Take mine.”

Soon he’ll lead me back up to the villa, let me lean into him for shelter. He’ll place me shivering on the teak bench in the shower while the water steams the glass. _You don’t have to_ , I’ll say, and he’ll ignore me, grab the wand and tilt my head back gently with an index finger under my chin. And I normally would shut my eyes, but I have to see him, to see the concentration on his face as he wets my hair, so careful not to sweep too far and soak my face, flood my eyes.

He’ll work the shampoo with the pads of his fingers, and I won’t even realize that I’ve fallen back into his touch, that most of my weight is in his hands. He won’t complain. He will transfer my skull from hand to hand so that he can suds behind my ears.

He will hold up the conditioner with a soft smile because he wouldn’t have told me that he’d switched to my brand when he’d come to New York in February. _I just love the smell_ , he’ll say simply, and I’ll know what that means, and I’ll stare at him with wonder, at the crescent of salt that’s already started to form on his temple because he hasn’t bothered with himself at all.

And the glass walls of the shower will be opaque from the steam, and I’ll be so relaxed I’ll just sit there with my knees fallen open while he lathers the top of my feet and the underside of my arms and length of my spine, following each with the warm rain.

I won’t even remember when he cleans himself before he wraps me up in a thick white towel the size of a tarp and guides me into the bedroom, peels back one side of the down comforter and stuffs me inside. _My hair’s wet_ , I’ll protest meekly through the layers of exhaustion. _The sheets_ …

And the light will snap out, the bed will dip. _They’ll dry_ , he’ll whisper and kiss my cheek, tuck me under his arm. _Get some sleep_.

 _But_ …

 _Timmy. You traveled five thousand miles in eighteen hours. Sleep now._ And he’ll sigh, his own weariness dragging at him. _We’ve got time, time to take at least one breath_...

**Author's Note:**

> Armie's story about the Pacifiic striped octopus is real, and as soon as I heard about it, I thought of Armie. I wonder why that is...
> 
> There are several versions of how Artemis and Adonis battled one another, each claiming superiority as a hunter. To my mind, Armie bests them both. 😉
> 
> If you enjoyed this and have some time on your hands, I'd be honored if you'd check out some of my other works!
> 
> [P.S. None of my WIPs are abandoned, merely evolving at a geologic pace, so please don't give up on them!]


End file.
